NLP Progress in Indigenous Latin American Languages

The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages and the risk they face of being overlooked in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to bridge the gap between these communities and researchers, emphasizing the need for inclusive technological advancements that respect indigenous community perspectives. We show the NLP progress of indigenous Latin American languages and the survey that covers the status of indigenous languages in Latin America, their representation in NLP, and the challenges and innovations required for their preservation and development. The paper contributes to the current literature in understanding the need and progress of NLP for indigenous communities of Latin America, specifically low-resource and indigenous communities in general.

EthioMT: Parallel Corpus for Low-resource Ethiopian Languages

Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT leaves much to be desired for low-resource languages. This is due to the smaller size of available parallel corpora in these languages, if such corpora are available at all. NLP in Ethiopian languages suffers from the same issues due to the unavailability of publicly accessible datasets for NLP tasks, including MT. To help the research community and foster research for Ethiopian languages, we introduce EthioMT -- a new parallel corpus for 15 languages. We also create a new benchmark by collecting a dataset for better-researched languages in Ethiopia. We evaluate the newly collected corpus and the benchmark dataset for 23 Ethiopian languages using transformer and fine-tuning approaches.

EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

First Attempt at Building Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation of Northeast India's Very Low-Resource Languages

This paper presents the creation of initial bilingual corpora for thirteen very low-resource languages of India, all from Northeast India. It also presents the results of initial translation efforts in these languages. It creates the first-ever parallel corpora for these languages and provides initial benchmark neural machine translation results for these languages. We intend to extend these corpora to include a large number of low-resource Indian languages and integrate the effort with our prior work with African and American-Indian languages to create corpora covering a large number of languages from across the world.

SpaDeLeF: A Dataset for Hierarchical Classification of Lexical Functions for Collocations in Spanish

In natural language processing (NLP), lexical function is a concept to unambiguously represent semantic and syntactic features of words and phrases in text first crafted in the Meaning-Text Theory. Hierarchical classification of lexical functions involves organizing these features into a tree-like hierarchy of categories or labels. This is a challenging task as it requires a good understanding of the context and the relationships among words and phrases in text. It also needs large amounts of labeled data to train language models effectively. In this paper, we present a dataset of most frequent Spanish verb-noun collocations and sentences where they occur, each collocation is assigned to one of 37 lexical functions defined as classes for a hierarchical classification task. Each class represents a relation between the noun and the verb in a collocation involving their semantic and syntactic features. We combine the classes in a tree-based structure, and introduce classification objectives for each level of the structure. The dataset was created by dependency tree parsing and matching of the phrases in Spanish news. We provide baselines and data splits for each objective.

Automatic Translation of Hate Speech to Non-hate Speech in Social Media Texts

In this paper, we investigate the issue of hate speech by presenting a novel task of translating hate speech into non-hate speech text while preserving its meaning. As a case study, we use Spanish texts. We provide a dataset and several baselines as a starting point for further research in the task. We evaluated our baseline results using multiple metrics, including BLEU scores. The aim of this study is to contribute to the development of more effective methods for reducing the spread of hate speech in online communities.

Enhancing Translation for Indigenous Languages: Experiments with Multilingual Models

This paper describes CIC NLP's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) -- Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.

Parallel Corpus for Indigenous Language Translation: Spanish-Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec

In this paper, we present a parallel Spanish-Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec corpus for machine translation (MT) tasks, where Mazatec and Mixtec are two indigenous Mexican languages. We evaluated the usability of the collected corpus using three different approaches: transformer, transfer learning, and fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual MT models. Fine-tuning the Facebook M2M100-48 model outperformed the other approaches, with BLEU scores of 12.09 and 22.25 for Mazatec-Spanish and Spanish-Mazatec translations, respectively, and 16.75 and 22.15 for Mixtec-Spanish and Spanish-Mixtec translations, respectively. The findings show that the dataset size (9,799 sentences in Mazatec and 13,235 sentences in Mixtec) affects translation performance and that indigenous languages work better when used as target languages. The findings emphasize the importance of creating parallel corpora for indigenous languages and fine-tuning models for low-resource translation tasks. Future research will investigate zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to further improve translation performance in low-resource settings. The dataset and scripts are available at \url{https://github.com/atnafuatx/Machine-Translation-Resources}

Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in Ethiopia. Furthermore, we provide a centralized repository on GitHub that contains publicly available resources for various NLP tasks in these languages. This repository can be updated periodically with contributions from other researchers. Our objective is to identify research gaps and disseminate the information to NLP researchers interested in Ethiopian languages and encourage future research in this domain.